Friday, April 2, 2010

Did I mention me?

My Book Notes are now up on Largehearted Boy. If you're not familiar with the series, it asks writers to "create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book." You'll recognize many of these songs from my list of mix-tape hits, but this time with commentary! Here's an excerpt:

"I've Got a Match" by They Might Be Giants

"I've got a match: your embrace and my collapse"—based on a crude joke and yet, improbably, heartbreaking. I aspire to this precarious balance between poignancy and absurdity.

"Brothers on a Hotel Bed" by Death Cab for Cutie

The saddest, most nostalgia-heavy poems in the book involve my brother; we're not as close now as we once were and I've got all kinds of complexes. At some point I had to admit to myself that this song is about an estranged couple and not siblings, which is too bad, because I find the central simile ("now we say good night from our own separate sides, like brothers on a hotel bed") so much more moving in reference to brothers, which I realize is not how similes work. Also, Death Cab for Cutie kind of sucks. I basically just love brother songs. See also: "Blue Ridge Mountains" by Fleet Foxes and "The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us" by Sufjan Stevens.

Another cool thing: The Rumpus, one of my favorite artsy/litsy blogs, is publishing a new poem every day in April. Here's the full line-up; an excerpt from the prose-poem project I'm working on now will go live on April 8 (smack-dab in the middle of AWP!).